Blackhawks create traffic and jams in Game Four

BOSTON -- It was well before Wednesday morning, presumably, that Joel Quenneville laid out the plan to find the needle-thin cracks and crevices in the Bruins defense and goaltender Tuukka Rask.

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By
BRIAN HAMILTON
Posted Jun. 20, 2013 @ 9:21 am

BOSTON -- It was well before Wednesday morning, presumably, that Joel Quenneville laid out the plan to find the needle-thin cracks and crevices in the Bruins defense and goaltender Tuukka Rask. But the Blackhawks coach made it public after the morning skate, exactly what was his club’s goal to produce goals:

Fire blasts from the point. Crowd the crease and the general net area. Then scrounge and hack and fight to get a blade on the shot or whatever loose change circulated around their skate blades.

And a withering 6-5 overtime victory in Game 4 certainly had the Hawks on the rebound. There were big shots from the perimeter, followed by plenty of hard work in front of Rask, and what followed were goals off a deflection from Jonathan Toews, off rebounds from Patrick Kane and Patrick Sharp and finally a rocket from Brent Seabrook through traffic to end it all.

“We were just around the net, we were getting inside and found rebounds,” Toews said. “If they’re ugly goals, we don’t care.”

The plan was obvious and it obviously worked, especially in the second period to recapture momentum. There was Michal Rozsival, picking up a puck near the top of the offensive zone and rocketing it toward the cage, where Toews waited with his stick blade to redirect it under Rask’s pads.

Barely two minutes later, it was Rozsival again firing toward a scrum, with the rebound going to Bryan Bickell, and with Kane picking up the rebound of Bickell’s shot to backhand in his score.

“That’s the game plan,” Rozsival said. “You want to be kind of predictable. You want the forwards to know that as a defenseman, we are going to be shooting, and we want them to go to the net.

”It has to be natural. Every time you get the puck on the net from the point, there’s a chance for rebounds and deflections. It’s always a good play.“

It may be the only play, really, to crack the Bruins and Rask, who had held the Hawks without a goal for nearly 130 consecutive minutes coming into Wednesday night.

”We had some breaks around the net, found some loose pucks,“ Quenneville said. ”We had way more traffic than the last game.

“If (Rask) sees the puck, he’s going to be almost impossible to beat. We want to make sure we get there and make it hard on him to find it, try to go on the second and third opportunity.”

Hawks’ defensemen collectively recorded 11 shots on goal, officially, led by Johnny Oduya’s five. But the point was almost not even to get it on net, because the point is to send the puck into a thicket of sticks and arms and make its trajectory nearly impossible to decipher or stop.

This was exactly Seabrook’s thinking on the goal that ended it all a little less than 10 minutes into overtime. The Hawks defenseman with the heavy shot wasn’t thinking about scoring. He wasn’t even thinking about getting it to Rask. He merely was thinking, he said, about eluding the Bruins defenders coming his way.

“I just tried to get it past the centerman and their forward coming out to block it,” Seabrook said. “Our forwards did a good job getting in front and boxing out. It was just a great play.”

In a blink, the puck was in the net and a series was tied. Always a good play, indeed.